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Silent Dark
Silent Dark was our first commercially-released title- a traditional miniatures wargame set in the 25th Century. Silent Dark was and is a very innovative title- among other things, it was the first miniatures game to ship with a fully computerized method for making new game objects- everything from Creatures to Vehicles. It also boasts an extremely flexible rules system that is easily converted to many genres, and the expanded version of the Design System is made for people wanting to play everything from Super Heroes combat to Fantasy. I'm still quite proud of how flexible this system is, and how easy it is to learn and play. Sadly, the market didn't like this game, despite the development time and energy put into it, so after earning a few thousand dollars for over a man-year of work, we decided that it made more sense to release it for free as a PDF, hoping that people would gradually realize that what we'd made was pretty nifty. Enjoy the resulting game. The download link will give you all of the released materials that came with this game, including the Javascript version of our Design System (this uses pop-ups, but it's not dangerous and won't do anything nasty to your computer- we're using the pop-ups to pass data back and forth in the program, not to learn more about you, and you can use it offline). Designer: Greg Wolfe G.U.T.S. in a Nutshell G.U.T.S. is a tactical game system, designed for play with miniatures. The rules are intended to provide gamers with a way to simulate exciting battles on a tabletop, floor, or other flat surface. Why is it called G.U.T.S.? Read on! Generic: the rules provided can be bent, broken and modified to allow for various Genres of tabletop conflict. We have provided one Genre in this copy of the game rules: Silent Dark. This is a science-fiction setting, which takes place in a fantastic version of the 26th Century. The Genre has a background story, specific Genre limitations, and other features. It’s not only a cool game in its own right- it’s a demonstration of the generic nature of the rules. Game Masters and Players should feel free to create their own Genres, or modify the ones that Wolfe Games provides as modules. Official G.U.T.S. tournament play will use Genre settings that are written or published through Wolfe Games, but players should feel free to use this powerful system to create their own games! Universal: the rules can be used for almost any kind of tactical game. You could build a Giant Robot game, a Superheroes game, a Super-Realism Period Warfare game, or whatever you please. Genres can include all sorts of specific rules or limit existing rules if they choose. For example, in the Silent Dark setting, there aren’t any rules that govern how much ammunition a particular weapon uses up each turn. Realistic battle injuries aren’t simulated, nor do the rules deal with every possible issue of weather, ECCM, detailed injuries. . . you get the picture. We didn’t put these rules into the Basic Game, because: A. They clutter play with lots of dice rolls, charts, and computations. B. Genres are a better way to handle these sorts of needs. Players can play a Genre that fits their style, or design their own Genres to handle specific simulations. Tactical: G.U.T.S. is designed to simulate tactical conflict- battles between individual units, soldiers, ships or aircraft. This may be anything from fairly large battles, where a single miniature represents 1000 soldiers, to a very small number of people- say, a fantasy basketball team. G.U.T.S. has not been designed as a Role-Playing Game- this system was developed for tactical games, not for the deep character-development of an RPG. Nor was it designed for “deep strategy” games, which depict conflict on a very large scale (countries vs. countries, for example). This is not to say that G.U.T.S. could not be adapted to either type of game, but it would require very extensive alterations to the Core Rules, and probably wouldn’t play like G.U.T.S. any more. If Wolfe Games designs such a product, you may be assured that it will have an appropriate set of rules. System: as the above notes have indicated, G.U.T.S. is not a specific “world” depicted through tactical combat. Instead, what G.U.T .S. does is provide a way for creating specific Genres, which are each based on the same rules, but with independent variations. G.U.T.S. is a system more than a specific game, although it can be played totally generically, with no Genre limitations whatsoever. Freedom rules! Link to Rules http://www.wolfegames.com/SilentDark/SilentDark.htm Category:Science Fiction Category:25/30mm Category:15mm